Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke/The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke, The

The Rhetorical and Poetic Imaginations of Kenneth Burke The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke by James H. East. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. 288 + xxxvii pp.

The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke by Ross Wolin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 256 + xiii pp.

In Kenneth Burke's familiar credo, the job of the critic who would best fathom the means and ends of our symbolic actions is "to use all that is there to use" (The Philosophy of Literary Form 23). It is in fitting observance of Burke's critical prescription, then, that two recent texts from the University of South Carolina Press provide us with much more to use in our efforts to understand Burke, and from very different points in the spectrum of what can be made useful. Ross Wolin's The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke and James H. East's The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke both complement the Press's series on Studies in Rhetoric/Communication (ed. Thomas W. Benson), and both are rewarding in the context of their respective theoretical and biographical projects.

Readers who seek a critical introduction to Kenneth Burke's broad inquiry into human symbol use have a variety of such synopses to consider: from Burke's own frequent self-summarizings throughout his career, to concise, immediately accessible reviews such as David Blakesley's recent Elements of Dramatisrn, to William H. Rueckert's hermeneutic guide to the entire Burkean corpus in Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. None of these extant helps, however, begins with an objective as rarefied as Wolin's in The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke: to rescue Burke from the joint misunderstanding and misuse that his broad pluralism evokes, even invites-misunderstanding and misuse that can be laid at the feet of "even his most ardent admirers." "Scholars have sought within Burke theoretical and philosophical systematicity that is not there," Wolin writes; "Worse yet," he continues, "many readers have largely ignored the social and political arguments that infuse his work." In response to these dual flattenings, Wolin offers his clarification of "what Burke was trying to get at" in his eight major theoretical works (1931-1966), coupling this explication with insight into how the methods and aims of Burke's works were animated by the changing sociohistorical contexts of their composition (xii-xiii).

Wolin's text is organized in three parts, around his division of Burke's production into three "phases [that] demarcate different emphases in his thinking" (n now conventional practice, even if the dividing lines have been drawn in various ways). Wolin opens each phase with a brief sketch of the trajectory that unites the works grouped within it, then examines each work in detail in its own chapter (the concluding chapter handles The Rhetoric of Religion and Language as Symbolic Action together). Permanence and Change, fur example, the beginning of phase two (1935-1941), "The Tactics of Conflict and Cooperation," shows Burke leavening the literary-aesthetic focus of his preceding Counter-Statement with an explicit concern for how "language operates in human collectives or organizations," for "how our culture constructs social and political Institutions . . . to deal with what are principally symbolic structures" (77, 85). After illustrating how Permanence is thus both "an extension and rearticulation" of earlier concerns with art and communication (68), Wolin reviews the text's checkered critical reception, highlighting the post-Depression political stakes that were bound to augur resistance to Kurke's heterodoxy. Wolin's consistent attention to these social and political realities reveals how Burke's critical intentions have often been too narrowly circumscribed, and nowhere is this more soundly demonstrated than in Wolin's discussion of The Philosophy of Literary Form. Pensively documenting the limited readings of critics as different as Rene Wellek and Frank Lentricchia, Wolin challenges us to see the text as more than a technical treatise on Burke's formal method of "clusters" and "equations." Burke may be "more indirect than ever about his social and political concerns" here, Wolin grants, but the point of "better understand[ing] the core of an aesthetic expression" for Burke is nonetheless to better understand how such expression "serves Individual and collective rhetorical functions in our lives" (131). A text generally known for little more than Burke's now-ubiquitous metaphor of the "unending conversation," The Philosophy of Literary Form manifests itself through Wolin's reading as a prescient yoking of the structural and the social in the analysis of language, a "challenge . . . to see the internality of the text as a manifestation of the external" (132).

Perhaps Wolin's most valuable contribution in this book is the answer to the question that his title begs: what, exactly, is the rhetorical imagination of Kenneth Burke? As Wolin articulates, it is an imagination that germinates from Burke's meditations on the social nature of aesthetics, born of his own less-than-acclaimed short fiction and galvanized by the subsequent critical neglect of his first (and last) novel, Towards a Better Life. As Wolin explains in Chapter One, "The Formation of a Critic," Burke's mounting interest throughout the 1920's in "the sociological aspects of the artist's ability to communicate" was at first informed by "no inkling of any particular rhetorical theory" (32-33). However, with the publication of Counter-Statement (1931) and Permanence and Change (1935), and especially in his discussions of form and the idea of "orientation" therein, Burke became "surer" of the ways in which rhetoric illuminates artistic expression specifically and the nature and function of language generally. "Occupy[ing] his mind for the next half century, impressing its indelible mark, directly and indirectly, on all his criticism," rhetoric became Burke's means to something larger and more compelling than a simple, systematized theory of rhetoric itself.